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What is portable software?
A portable app can be any type of software, a word processor, antivirus, game, email, anything. But to be portable it must save all its settings and data within its own folder.

The advantages of software being self contained in this way are:

You can keep the software on a usb key, or portable hard drive and use them on any other computer while still retaining your settings and data.

You can use your browser, or email software on another computer and when you remove your usb key, no trace is left on the other computer, all your emails, browser cache and favorites stay with you.

You can use software you are familiar with and it's set up the way you prefer.

No one will complain about you changing their settings, or installing anything on their computer.

There are even advantages to using portable apps on your own computer:

They are self contained within their own folder, so no problems with system files being overwritten etc, on installation.

Similarly, uninstalling is painless, simply delete the software folder and it's gone without a trace, no messy registry entries, or orphan files.

If you have to reinstall Windows, it's simply a matter of copying the folder from your backup (you do make backups, dont you?) and recreating the program shortcut.
If you keep the program folder on a separate partition, or drive, you only need to create a new shortcut.

If you upgrade to a new computer, or OS, you can simply copy the software folder across, no more exporting and importing emails, favorites, address books etc.

The disadvantages of using portable apps:

If they have been converted from a previously non-portable app, they can be a little buggy (sometimes) and not all features may be supported.

Freeware applications are often portable, the author may mention on his site, or in the help file, that the software does not write to the registry, or anywhere else.
If you are not sure if software is portable or not, good indications are:
The software came as a zip file, or just an .exe, with no installer.
The software folder contains a file called settings, or config.
Finally you could just try it, if your settings are retained when you run your usb key on another computer, the software is portable.

Web site -- PortableApps.com

The PortableApps web site specialises in free portable applications and has gathered together a collection of nineteen free software applications and integrated them in the Portable Apps Suite.
This gives you a menu system that you can run from your portable drive and is much more convenient than clicking through individual folders.
You can also store your documents within the Portable Apps Suite, for mobile access to your images, music, etc.

If you have broadband you can download the Portable Apps Suite, with all the portable apps in one go, but if you are on dialup, you can download just the Portable Apps Suite on its own (740k) and then add the software applications of your choice.
When you run the Portable Apps Suite download, you will find that it extracts two folders and the .exe to a location of your choice. You can add, or remove software folders or data files to the two folders by dragging & dropping as usual.
Close the Portable Apps Suite menu, while you are adding or removing software and then refresh the software icons from the options menu.
A simple backup program is incorporated into the menu, allowing you to backup your settings and data, documents, or everything on the drive.
The Portable Apps Suite menu is very easy to use and fades away to the system tray when you don't need it. The only slight disappointments, were the inability to reorder the software in the menu list and the search feature uses Windows own search tool.

The portable apps provided on the web site seem to be very good conversions and I had no problems with any that I tried. I hadn't used the Thunderbird email before and was impressed with its features.
Sudoku Portable is one of the best free implementations of Sudoku that I have seen, not as good as the commercial program from Green Street software that I use, but pretty good, although the difficulty settings aren't that great, easy and medium are far too easy, hard is okay and impossible is very, very, very hard.

If you currently use Nvu for creating your web site, I would recommend swapping to Kompozer Portable, which is Nvu, but with a lot of the irritating bugs fixed. I recently started to use Nvu for my web site, as I wanted to be able to use .png format images, which Frontpage Express can't handle. But the bugs were getting me down, Kompozer Portable is a great improvement.

You can add other portable software to the Portable Apps Suite, than that listed on the site, but the settings and data backup only works with official portable apps software.

The Portable Apps Suite is an excellent idea, that works very well and the portable apps are great, whether used with the suite, or on their own.

All the software on the site is free (usually open source)
Requirements, the Portable Apps Suite runs on Win 98,Me,2000,XP,Vista and Wine, but indivdual applications requirements will vary.

http://portableapps.com/

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